Why does that have to be the rare case? What's the common case of using "+" that you're trying to avoid?

"Microsoft + Apple will both.." I imagine people use + to get by character limit in the title.

>I imagine people use + to get by character limit in the title.

What's wrong with that? The same phenomenon occurs on Twitter - people find a way to optimize every character.

Isn't an 80 character limit for titles on a modern web forum really the problem?

They should just get their threads removed then. There is no reason to silently apply that weird behaviour instead.

In fact, I would expect this to be quite rare as most people would probably use & instead.

For future reference, when someone really wants a plus sign would using Unicode FF0B (full width plus) get past the automatic "and" conversion?

We started stripping out a bunch of character ranges a few years ago because people were using them to play Unicode games in HN titles and the idea here is plain text. But I'm not sure in that case. You could test it if you wanted.

I tried it and it works. U+FF0B gives a plus sign when used in an HN title. It's a fair bit wider than normal, so may look a little off but not as off as "and". Here's a line of 10 U+FF0B's and a line of 10 +'s for comparison:

＋＋＋＋＋＋＋＋＋＋

++++++++++